American Psycho Almost Ended With A Big Musical Number
Both Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel "American Psycho" and Mary Harron's 2000 film adaptation of it are salient and vicious satires of the callow, wealth-obsessed, ultra-vain, morally bankrupt yuppie culture of the 1980s. The story's protagonist, Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale in the movie) is a toxic, misogynist blowhard whose only concerns are his violent, narcissistic appetites, and whose only concerns are other yuppies whose business cards look 0.0003% better than his. When the urge strikes, Patrick kills the men and women in his path, merely because he is angry and it occurs to him to kill in that moment. Ellis frames Bateman's murderous impulses as an outcropping of 1980s me-me-me culture, while Harron sees them as logical extensions of male toxicity.
Harron wisely filmed "American Psycho" as equal parts horror and absurdist comedy. Patrick Bateman's bizarre homicidal frenzies are often instigated by weird things. In one notable scene, Bateman puts on a parka in his apartment, fully intending to kill a visiting co-worker with an axe. Before committing the deed, however, he regales his companion with an earnest — and misguided — review of the new Huey Lewis and the News record. One could say that Bateman's love of "Fore!" is an indicator of his evil.
Other weird, fantastical elements show up later in the film as well. While withdrawing money from an ATM, Bateman notices a kitten at his feet. He picks it up. The ATM screen bears the phrase "FEED ME A KITTEN," and Bateman begins stuffing its little paw in the card slot. Don't worry. The kitten gets away unscathed.
In a 2010 interview with Movieline, Ellis revealed a few other fantastical elements that were in the film's initial draft, including a musical number set to Barry Manilow's "Daybreak."
The Ellis draft
The final draft of the "American Psycho" screenplay was written by Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner ("Go Fish," "The L Word"). Bret Easton Ellis himself, however, wrote an early draft that wasn't used. Ellis, in the Movieline interview, claimed he was getting bored with rehashing "American Psycho" yet again (he had written it a decade ago), and threw in the musical number just to keep his mind occupied. Ellis said:
"I think Barry Manilow's 'Daybreak' was playing, and there's like Patrick Bateman sitting in the park talking to people, and then it ends on the top of the World Trade Center. A big musical number, very elaborate. I'm glad it wasn't shot, but that kind of shows you where I was when I was writing the script. I was bored with the material."
Ellis went on to say that he loves his books while he's still in the process of writing them. But once they've been out for a while, he would prefer to move on.
When Ellis was writing that musical number, David Cronenberg was circling the project, hoping to direct. Ellis recalled that Cronenberg made odd demands, such as none of the film's action could take place in a night club, and that it should only be about 65 pages long (most screenplays typically translate to one minute of film per page; Cronenberg claimed he stretches each page into two minutes). Several Hollywood heartthrobs also wanted to play the role of Patrick Bateman, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Harron took over the film in 1997 and Cronenberg made "Crash" instead. DiCaprio, it seems, was offered the role without Harron's knowledge, which was annoying; Harron wanted Christian Bale specifically. Bale, incidentally, modeled his performance on Tom Cruise.
Would Manilow have improved the movie? Could it be magic?